Some of my earliest memories of reading are from my father’s gas station, where I would sit at the edge of the pavement beneath the CITGO sign with a book spread across my knees, eating ninety-nine-cent hot dogs and boiled peanuts while cars arrived, filled their tanks, and returned to wherever their lives were happening. My father worked inside, building a life in the particular American way available to him, which meant long hours beneath fluorescent lights and the understanding that his exhaustion was purchasing possibilities for his children. I did not yet have the language for sacrifice, immigration, or diaspora; I only knew that I liked reading and that the patch of pavement outside the gas station was as good a place as any to disappear into a book.

Looking back, it would be easy to turn this into the beginning of an immigrant success story: the Palestinian boy reading outside his father’s gas station, already preparing for law school, already determined to travel farther than the generation before him. But I was not preparing for anything. I was a child sitting near his father, enjoying a book and whatever could be bought cheaply from inside.

The ambition came later, I think. It was simply understood that my parents had not crossed countries and started over so that I could live carelessly. Their sacrifices had given me choices, and I was supposed to choose well enough to make those sacrifices mean something.

Being the firstborn child of immigrants makes this expectation especially difficult to escape. Your parents are learning the country at the same time you are learning how to be a person, and somehow you become responsible for both educations. There is no older sibling to explain which classes matter, how college works, what kind of career is safe, or how much of yourself you are allowed to risk. You make decisions with incomplete information, then those decisions become part of the map for everyone coming behind you.

The first child is both the experiment and the example. If you succeed, your success expands what the family believes is possible; if you fail, the failure can become a warning repeated long after you recover from it. Even choices that should be private begin to feel like family decisions because they will affect what your parents understand, what younger relatives are allowed to attempt, and whether all the work that brought you here appears to have paid off.

And so, I wanted to be great, and I still do.

 

I know that sounds slightly unbearable, but I do not mean that I expect strangers to recognize me in airports or that I believe history has been waiting impatiently for my arrival. I mean that I have always wanted to do something useful on a scale large enough to matter. I wanted to take care of my family, serve my people, fight injustice, write something worth reading, and leave the world less cruel than I found it. I wanted, in the restrained and perfectly reasonable manner of an immigrant firstborn, to save everyone without disappointing anyone.

Law school seemed like it might narrow that ambition into an actual life. Instead, it showed me more ways I could be useful and gave me more opportunities to worry that I was choosing the wrong one. I could build a stable life for my family, devote myself to public work, write, organize, practice law, or attempt all of them at once while calling the resulting exhaustion discipline.

The problem is not that these are bad choices. The problem is that each one satisfies a different obligation, and choosing among them feels less like exercising freedom than deciding whom I am willing to disappoint.

Palestine has made that pressure heavier. It is difficult to treat uncertainty about the future as an interesting period of self-discovery while people you know are among the dead and your people are being killed, starved, displaced, and imprisoned. The usual advice to take your time and figure out what makes you happy begins to sound inadequate when other people have been denied the time you are being encouraged to enjoy.

I know that I have a duty to Palestine, and I would not want a life in which I felt free from that duty. It has shaped how I understand justice and what I believe I owe people beyond myself. Still, living in the diaspora means knowing that your safety has given you responsibilities while also knowing that nothing you do from that safety will feel equal to what others endure. The obligation is necessary, but necessity does not make it light.

I think our society is very fond of calling contradictions choices, as though giving people more options automatically gives them more freedom. We tell children of immigrants to honor their parents’ sacrifices, then tell them they should stop living for other people. We tell them to pursue stable careers, then wonder why they are not following their passions. We tell them to follow those passions, although everyone quietly hopes the passion includes health insurance. We tell them to remember where they came from, assimilate enough to succeed, give back to their communities, establish boundaries with their families, become financially independent, and remain grateful for the opportunity to manage all of this.

Firstborn children are expected to be independent while remaining available to everyone. We are supposed to take risks because our parents gave us opportunities they never had, but we are also supposed to avoid risks because too many people are relying on us. We should make our own decisions, except when those decisions affect the family, which is to say nearly always. We should be more successful than our parents without ever making them feel that the life they built was somehow smaller.

The same confusion follows us into work. Young people are told to find careers that provide money, purpose, flexibility, stability, social impact, and enough free time to become people outside those careers. If work does not provide all of this, we are told we chose badly. Apparently the problem is never that society asks employment to supply every form of meaning that community, family, politics, faith, and ordinary leisure once shared. The problem is that we did not locate the correct job posting.

Palestinians in the diaspora inherit a particularly cruel version of this conflict because distance produces both power and guilt. We have access to institutions, platforms, and forms of safety that many of our people are denied, and that access imposes real obligations. At the same time, no amount of usefulness can erase the knowledge that we are speaking about dangers other people must physically endure. We are expected to translate the dead into arguments, to make grief legible to audiences determined not to understand it, and to continue building careers and lives while a part of us remains suspended with the people we could not protect.

Has giving us more choices made us more certain about how to live? Are first-generation children less afraid of disappointing their parents? Are young people more confident about their futures now that every interest can be turned into a side business and every career decision is treated as a declaration of personal identity? I do not think we feel free. I think we feel as though we are constantly selecting the wrong answer on a test nobody prepared us to take.

Treating every problem as a matter of personal choice is convenient because it means no institution ever has to accept responsibility. If you are unhappy, you chose the wrong career. If you are exhausted, you failed to establish boundaries. If your work feels meaningless, you did not follow your passion. If your family remains financially insecure, you should have chosen stability. There is always another decision you supposedly should have made, which allows the world to avoid answering for the conditions under which you had to make it.

The more pressure I feel, the more tempted I become to solve the problem by choosing one version of myself and discarding the others. I could become the serious professional who accepts that change is slow and works patiently within institutions. I could reject that person as a coward and devote myself entirely to writing and political work. I could decide that ambition itself is the problem, move somewhere quiet, buy several plants, and become someone who does not check the news before getting out of bed.

But the good parts of my life were not built by abandoning every person I had previously been. Law school did not erase the child who read outside the gas station, and writing did not erase the son who wants to give his family the security they worked for. Palestine did not become less important when I entered American institutions; if anything, those institutions clarified why it had to remain important. The pieces do not fit together neatly, but that does not mean one of them must be thrown away.

I am beginning to think I have mistaken having several obligations for having several incompatible lives. I have treated responsibility to my family, duty to Palestine, professional ambition, writing, and the desire for an ordinary human existence as though choosing any one of them requires betraying the rest. That may be because starting over is easier to imagine than building a life capacious enough to hold contradictions.

Anything worthwhile needs to be developed slowly, adjusted when it stops working, and allowed to carry evidence of what came before it. I do not need to abandon ambition to admit that I am tired, and I do not need to abandon responsibility to want a life containing joy. I can take my obligations seriously without treating exhaustion as proof that I have taken them seriously enough.

At my dad’s gas station, almost everyone who arrived was trying to get somewhere else. For a long time, I understood my own life in the same way, with every accomplishment providing enough fuel to reach the next destination, where I would finally become the person capable of meeting every expectation placed upon him.

I still believe that I am meant to do something great, although I am beginning to understand that greatness cannot mean becoming personally responsible for repairing every wound I have inherited. My duty to Palestine is real, and I would distrust any version of freedom that required me to abandon it, but duty cannot provide a complete set of instructions for a human life. It can tell me whom I must not forget and what I must refuse to become; it cannot always tell me which road to take.

Perhaps there is no freedom from these choices, only the difficult freedom of deciding how to carry them. I do not know exactly where I am going, and I no longer believe uncertainty means that I have failed the people who brought me here. For now, I remain somewhere between the pavement and the destination, still beneath that CITGO sign in one sense, holding a book while the traffic moves around me, trying to build a life that belongs to my people without disappearing entirely inside the obligation to save them.

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